The Christian moral life seeks to offer an account of the Christian life. It is in this sense that the word “piety” is used. Practices of piety refer not narrowly to spiritual practices but—as the word “piety” originally meant—to our duties that bind us to God, to our neighbors, and to our true selves. Christian ethics as reflection on the Christian life are not then narrow and separate disciplines concerned with right action (whether in terms of ends, virtues, or principles), but are grounded in our encounter with God and the practices that witness, nurture, and shape our continuing relationship with God. In this sense, The Christian Moral Life is formed in conversation with theology and with what has been traditionally called ascetical theology and what is now referred to more frequently as Christian spirituality or Christian practices—hence the subtitle, Practices of Piety.

      In the Roman Catholic tradition moral theologies came to be more narrowly focused on offering direction to confessors in order that they might help penitents in the confession of sins and offer appropriate judgment and counsel. However, moral theologies from Thomas Aquinas to Barnard Haring have sought more comprehensively to ground moral principles and specific moral judgments in understandings of the end of human life in God, the nature of the human person, and human virtues grounded in relationship to God, all placed